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on Monday July 07, 2014 @10:04PM
from the human-workers-sent-to-protein-bank dept.

redletterdave (2493036) writes The largest private employer in all of China and one of the biggest supply chain manufacturers in the world, Foxconn announced it will soon start using robots to help assemble devices at its several sprawling factories across China. Apple, one of Foxconn's biggest partners to help assemble its iPhones, iPads, will be the first company to use the new service. Foxconn said its new "Foxbots" will cost roughly $20,000 to $25,000 to make, but individually be able to build an average of 30,000 devices. According to Foxconn CEO Terry Gou, the company will deploy 10,000 robots to its factories before expanding the rollout any further. He said the robots are currently in their "final testing phase."

Unfortunately, communism has earned a fatally bad reputation after being misused by so many dictators during the 20th century.

The murder part of communism is a necessary component to deal with people who don't want to play along. That's why it happens all the time.
If you don't want to play by the rules of a society that has anything resembling a market economy, the outcome is well known: Your standard of living slides down to the lowest your fellow citizens will tolerate seeing.

If you disagree, kindly tell me what you do with people in your ideal communist society who want to put in above-average effort, and reap the extra rewards.

How are those *fundamentally* different from the people in my current society who want to take more than their allocated reward? Pretty sure we don't MURDER them.

Exiling the motivated will simply rapidly impoverish those that remain.

Calling them "the motivated" is a fallacy out of the gate. It has naught to do with motivation, and everything to do with them being criminals by the standards of the society.

I know plenty of people who are motivated to produce art, music, entertainment, and science for little to no unreasonable 'extra' reward beyond what they could otherwise earn for less effort. They do it because they enjoy these pursuits. You seem to discount them existing and suggest that the only reason anyone is motivated is so that they can "reap all fruits" for themselves. This is not the sole source of motivation, and it is arguably not the best source either.

Take a small commune of farmers, one farmer smarter than the others, discovers a technique to improve production -- shares it with the others, and they all benefit from increased leisure time. Why do you argue he would be NECESSARILY not motivated to do this? Because he doesn't gain an edge over his peers? That's absurd.

Communisum has a lot of real problems but having to "murder" people who are "motivated" is not one of them.

That's a pretty bold statement, especially considering that the industrial revolution (the thing that originally inspired the invention of communism) hasn't actually ended yet.

It's impossible to increase efficiency indefinitely without causing rampant unemployment at some point. Communism is a solution for a problem that hasn't quite happened yet (but it's silly to think it won't happen eventually).

Communism is not to blame for the atrocities committed by the dictators who misuse it as a means of control. Many of the greatest ideas come from the worst of people. We as rational human being are capable of distilling the idea from its source and judging on the merits.

The final end result of mass mechanized production is that the available workers will far outnumber the available jobs

That assumption is not borne out by history. If it were true, we should already have arrived at that point long ago, since it used to be that 95-98% of human labor was dedicated to agriculture, and the number is more like 2% today. How is it that anyone has work to do? We dramatically expanded some jobs and invented lots of new ones, many of which would be utterly baffling or even ludicrous to farmers of a few centuries ago. What will people do in the future to add value? If I knew that, I could undoubtedly make several fortunes. But what I do know is that they'll do something. Perhaps the economy will mostly be service-based, driven by peoples' desire to be served by people rather than machines. Perhaps much of it will be highly-specialized, custom-tailored creative manufacturing, producing one-off, hand-made items. Maybe a lot of it will be creative or artistic, a world of painters, storytellers, etc. Maybe it will mostly be about designing and rushing to market the next mass-produced faddish gewgaw (this seems very likely to me). Some of it will definitely be around the design, care and feeding of the robots, even if much of that work becomes robot-assisted.

What I do know is that as long as there are people there will be something person A wants from person B and vice versa, and with that basis for trade there will be an economy, and something akin to jobs.

this is the problem that communism was intended to solve.

That's revisionist history, ludicrously so. Marx never foresaw anything of the sort. He believed firmly in the labor theory of value, and as such all economic power derived from human labor, not from mechanical power. Communism was about combating the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few people who owned the means of production, at the expense of the masses who provided the labor (and hence the real value).

His view was misguided in many ways, not least in that it almost completely ignores the value of intellectual work; the guy who figures out the right way to apply labor to raw materials is fantastically more effective than the one who does it the wrong way, and in fact this applies at all levels of the chain, up to and including the allocation of capital. Communism is inherently horrible at effectively allocating resources since it lacks the price signals that bundle cost and relative value and communicate them in a way that enables efficient allocation of resources to maximize what people collectively perceive as good, which is why communist economies always fail, and will always fail, even in the presence of automated systems that produce and distribute all of the essentials of life to everyone equally, even if said essentials include what we'd call luxuries. Those essentials will become the baseline expectation, much like oxygen, and economic competition will be around something else.

Granted, Marx did say some interesting things but the question should be why communism would allow companies to build machines that remove income from humans?

Isn't that a nonsensical question? I would have thought that in an actual communistic society, the companies would be society's companies, building those machines to remove human labor would be simply the collective will of the people, and no income would be removed from humans because material wealth produced rather than income would be the driving force, and this wealth would be increased by building the machines, not diminished.

The whole premise of communism is "from everyone according to their ability, to everyone according to their need". It is meant to be a classless society (so no division into "workers" and everyone else), and, ideally, the one that is post-scarcity. The kind of thing described in TFA is in fact exactly what most communist utopia writers envisioned.

The entire worker angle was a way to achieve communism, starting from a capitalist society. It's not a core part of communism itself.

I wish I had some mod points - there are so many misconceptions about Marx and communism that it is sometimes painful to watch. Although, if we'll take anarchism or libertarian capitalism in their extreme (and unattainable) forms, they'll result in a really nice societies as well. We'll just need a different types of people for each of these systems to work properly. Right now it seems that we have the system that we deserve, no more, no less.

The whole premise of Communism is reliance on the worker, and protecting the worker (probably not the best choice of terminology but saves paragraphs of explanations) because the worker is the only way for bureaucrats to exist. Communism requires people to be busy at work, and if robots make people idle the system fails.

Communism (from Latin communis – common, universal) is a socioeconomic system structured upon common ownership of the means of production and characterized by the absence of classes, money, and the state; as well as a social, political and economic ideology and movement that aims to establish this social order...

... Communism becomes fully realized when the distinction between classes is no longer possible and therefore the state, which has been used as an instrument of class dictatorship, no longer exists. In the communist economy, production and consumption are fully socialized, and the processes for which are advanced into maximized automation, efficiency, and recycling.

I don't know, but from reading this, one could certainly conclude that firing bureaucrats and replacing workers with robots wherever possible ought to be very high on any communist's agenda!

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". - Karl Marx.

In otherwords everyone is a "worker" in a communist society (despite what you may think of bureaucrats and politicians). Marx thought that it would work because the communist movement belived technology was the road to equity. However they also belived that property above and beyond personal need was a barrier to the efficient use of technology and resources. Mao was a true communist in this respect in that he pulled down the "barrier" by forcing everyone to become a pesant farmer. The result was that millions starved to death.

I was a teenager when they finally booted out the gang of four. In the 40 years since that time China has dragged more people out of poverty than the rest of the world combined by directing it's economy towards feeding, housing, and employing it's own people. It's a remarkable turn around, the only economic feat I can can think of that comes close to this kind of growth was the rise of Gengis Kahn.

Both the US and China practise "crony capitilisim" (moderate facisism) these days, they just implement it differently. Actual reasearch [wikipedia.org] (as opposed to ideological naval gazing), into what makes a productive stable society indicates that the sweet spot for income disparity is somewhere around 10:1, ie: the top 1% earn 10X as much as the bottom 1%. Currently China has one of the worst equity ratings in the world, the US and Russia are about even but not that far behind China.

Both Capitalism and Communism are supposed to be about maintaining the work force, so guess where we all are today?

A nominally capitalist country pays a communist country for much of its manufacturing because it's cheaper, instead of employing its own citizens. So the logical next step is to just buy the robot factory workers from China to replace workers in the U.S. to save on shipping costs.

Capitalism is a system designed to reward capitalists. Capitalists are those who have capital. Capital is money/resources/etc. It has nothing to do with maintaining a work force. Capitalism, in theory, uses greed of capitalists to produce the most efficient systems of production possible. More efficient production creates the most supply with the lowest prices.

In reality, Capitalism produces monopolies. Monopoly is the natural end state of Capitalism. The big fish eat all the smaller fish, until there's only one big fish left. "There can be only one." Then, monopolies, given no competition and driven by greed, drive up prices and artificially restrict supply, thus creating great inefficiencies. It's like a pine forest, growing faster than all the trees around it, only to poison itself with acidic leaf litter once dominance is established.

The capitalists don't care, because the proles can go eat cake or whatever. They're sitting on a mountain of money and resources and exist in a system where "greed is good." In reality, an economic system is ideal when it most fairly distributes resources those who need them. When 3 million people in your country are homeless, and Detroit is bulldozing 40 square miles of homes... your system of economics is completely fucked up.

Replacing workers with robots is not inherently bad. Under the right economic model, having robots do all the work while humans have 100% leisure time would be an admirable goal. The problems begin when workers replaced by robots have no means to acquire food/shelter/resources. One solution might be to raise taxes on the capitalists and redistribute that in some way to the "have nots" but then companies like Apple hide hundreds of billions of dollars off shore to avoid said taxes.

Apple doesn't need the money at all, while the poor starve to death. That makes Apple and other companies like Apple the most despicable group of people on Earth. It isn't just Tim Cook or Jeff Bezos or Larry Page. Companies are made by people and every single person working at Apple is contributing to the problem.

Capitalism is a system designed to assure private property rights. Through assuring protection of private property from appropriation form the state, the risk of investment is lowered, thus encouraging investment. Investment provides the capital that allows new types of jobs to be created and technology to be improved.

Thus capitalism rewards capitalist investors with enhanced returns on capital, rewards laborers with better and more well paying jobs be

But then the problem is that there is no incentive for anyone to keep the factories running.

There is no MONETARY incentive for factory workers to create additional profit, above that which is needed for maintaining a monetary status quo, or a very slight profit above it.

There are plenty of other incentives though.Ever tried to beat your own score in a game? How about collecting all the special items or unlocking achievements?Anyone paid you for that? Did you get a badge? Or a shirt? How about a citation in front of your peers?How about your grades in elementary school? Did you get monetary incentive according to your grades and was that your primary motivator?Fucking? Do you get paid for that? How about eating?

From personal pride of one's work to various propaganda techniques appealing to various human prejudices, from "think of the children" to "Uncle Sam needs you".

Armies are the example of just such an arrangement.They "belong directly to the public, with what is essentially a 100% "tax" on all profits".

Plus, the workers get a chance to be killed and/or maimed while making almost no money for themselves.Who'd want to work at a place like that, right? No incentives will bring you back from the dead.And yet...

Monetary motivation is just the cheapest and easiest to work with, giving the lowest results. Very few people would put their life on the line for "just money".Millions of people put their lives in danger every day with no hope of monetary compensation.Doing it "for their community".Not "for their capital".

Wow, quite a distortion you came up with there. Granted, Marx did say some interesting things but the question should be why communism would allow companies to build machines that remove income from humans? For that matter, why is a "capitalist Republic" allowing it now?

Because a system, once build, is more than just a sum of its parts. It has independent existence and motives. What that means is that neither communism, nor capitalism, nor USA nor China, are under human control, so why would they serve human interests, except incidentally? Yes, these systems have human actors making decisions, but these humans can only make decisions within parameters given by the system itself - a Foxconn CEO must do whatever it takes to keep Foxconn "competitive", and if he won't, he'll be replaced by someone who will, and likely severely punished. An American politician must accept a system-approved role - a set of political positions - if he wants to be elected. A dictator, while seemingly free, faces the same situation, except the punishment for disobedience is death rather than merely dropping out. Human beings, even those seemingly in control, are little more than agent-slaves of the Lovecraftian monstrosity they've conjured.

No one wanted World War I, yet it still happened. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans wanted the world to end, yet they came within hair's width of blowing it all up during the Cuban crisis. Chinese don't want to breath a poisonous fume, yet Peking's air is just that. People regularly refer to "the market" like it was a living thing that needs to be appeased and soothed and definitely not something anyone can control - because, in some ways, it is.

Human beings aren't in control of their own nor the destiny of the world, and haven't been since civilization began. I suspect this is the real reason religions keep popping up: beneath the bizarre cruft all traditions tend to accumulate, they present a perfectly accurate picture of the everyday experience of living in a world ruled by utterly inhuman and mostly invisible forces. For example, "Free Market" is, for all intents and purposes, the god of capitalism, gets treated that way by everyone, has sacrifices performed to it, has temples and priests trying to predict its capricious whims, is the object of fundamentalist faith - I've had people define a human's very right to live in terms of body ownership - and doctrinal conflicts, etc. Someone who wasn't indoctrinated to the system from birth could hardly avoid classifying this all as a typical religion.

It really is the best if your goal is equality in poverty,
No one has done it "correctly" because it's founded on a fatally flawed understanding of human nature. Workers are lazy and will not produce if they don't have to. Governments with totalitarian powers will never wither away.

Completely unsustainable under the assumption people are allowed to continue to breed as they currently do.If every human on earth were to have the same luxuries which many of us do in the west (I'm typing this from my 1 bedroom apt, it's heated, I'm sitting on a $1000 comfortable office chair, behind 4 monitors, I saw a doctor today for free) then the entire world would collapse in about 11 minutes.

Maybe, just maybe if the machines did all the work AND we stopped our endless population / consumption, we m

If people continue to breed as they currently do, we're going to be just fine. Birth rates globally are on the deline. As education (espcially education of women) becomes commonplace in a country, birth rates drop. We are in no danger of over populating the planet. Depending on the projection, "peak people" just might be within our lifetime.

With advancing technology. why can't everyone have a high standard of living? Technology & weath are not a zero-sum game. More people with education & skills raise the standards for all. (If you disagree, explain to me where all the silicon valley wealth was durring the stone age.)

Stop worrying about how big your slice of the pie is. Let's make the pie bigger for everyone.

Maybe it will, maybe it won't. But unless there is some serious decline in technological progress, it's more likely that it WILL happen eventually, even if it doesn't happen in our lifetime.

This is the idea that drove Marx to come up with communism. He was there at the beginning of the industrial revolution, and he could see where mechanization would eventually lead. It just took a LOT longer than he was expecting, mostly because he didn't predict the invention of fast-food and starbucks which is the only thing that is currently keeping unemployment under control in the US.

Communism has been done correctly in the past, but never on a scale as large as a country.... at best, I think it has only been achieved at the scale of a modest community, and generally involving no more than a few thousand people or so.

Basically, when everyone in the community personally knows practically everyone else in it, there is a social obligation on everybody to conform to expected behavior on account of a complete lack of anonymity, and communism works. Individuals who do not fit in to such societies are unceremoniously kicked out and left to fend for themselves.

$1000 per month for a single person, which works out to just over $11.50/hour at 40 hours/week.

What? 40*11.5 is $460 a week. 4 weeks to a month gives us something like $1840 a month. Almost double the poverty level you brought up. $1000 a month comes out to about $6.25 an hour on a 40 hour week.

$15/hr is the minimum wage in Seatac, Washington. There is political pressure to raise the minimum wage to $10-15 nationwide, and one likely effect of that is to increase incentives to automate those jobs out of existence.

Also, the poverty level (at least in Minnesota anyway) is currently $1000 per month for a single person, which works out to just over $11.50/hour at 40 hours/week.

The poverty rate is based on households, not individuals. So if you are single and making $11.50 or less, you might want to share the rent with some friends rather than getting your own place. Not every job needs to pay enough to allow a teenager to buy a house and start a family.

I took it as pay attention, if you cost more than automation would cost, you will likely be training your replacement. If a 20,000 dollar robot can do your job for years on that 20,000 and you are insisting on being paid $28,000 a year- well simple math tells you which is more cost effective. And that doesn't even include taxes and crap you have to pay on a live person.

SO i guess what you can take from that is if you want paid more, provide more value or perha

But an assembly line manned by robots? Why should that be cheaper in China? Is capital that much cheaper?

Even if wages and other costs were equal, the location advantage is substantial. It's not that it's cheaper in China, but that it's cheaper in the huge manufacturing hubs. You have suppliers and manufacturers for just about every single component you need without long-distance shipping, and a deep pool of design and manufacturing expertise working in the area.

That's not to say you can't manufacture efficiently elsewhere (we have plenty of recent examples such as the Raspberry Pi), but that the advantages has as much to do with the concentration of resources as with the cost of labour and regulations. And of course, as this inudstry becomes ever more automated, it no longer matters much for jobs where it happens any longer.

If nobody can find work, that means, there is no work to do. Which is just awesome, if that's because robots are doing everything. The means of production will, finally, be able to satisfy all demand...

The real problem with this is that our countries are run by greedy fucking bastards. When there is nothing to exchange for money (which is exchanged for food, shelter etc..), then where will the masses get their daily bread? Who will share in all the new wealth? You can bet your ass that if everything is automated, it will be to the advantage of the already rich and elite and they will share NOTHING with the rest of us. Why the hell would they? After all, THEY were the ones who paid for and built the robots

Oh so a few engineers will have to be thrown a doggie biscuit (6-digit salary), I guess their plan will never work since you won't be able to overpower their morals with money! That's why the military-industrial complex never took off after all.

Not everyone is losing their jobs. Technological innovation usually leads to increased employment, as lower manufacturing costs lead to increased production, and expansion of non-automated jobs. As the cost of manufactured goods fall, people will consume more of them, but also spend less on them, and spend more on services, which are much harder to automate. Currently, China has a much smaller service sector than more advanced economies. That is changing fast.

. Technological innovation usually leads to increased employment, as lower manufacturing costs lead to increased production, and expansion of non-automated jobs.

1. People who lose jobs are not the ones who are going to get the newly created jobs.

2. World population finally seems to have started stabilizing. It took longer to add the last billion than the previous billion. We are still adding but heading towards 9.5 billion rather than 12 billion. So number of new jobs created is less than the number of jobs being lost to automation.

3. Most people can only do regular humdrum routine jobs. We evolved to hunt/gather do routine things. Not be on an ever accelerating treadmill of productivity and intellectual labor. I have performed at the top 1% of intellectual labor treadmill for 30 years now. Frankly I am tired. It ain't as much fun as people make it out to be. It is not sour grapes or anything, I got adequate returns for the labor. Still, I now realize routine humdrum jobs are the staple for humanity.

Man, I wish I had mod points today, 'cause you're dead on. Having worked with a lot of people "outside of my class" as a consultant in a (mostly) non-technical field, there are a LOT of people out there who couldn't do the advanced jobs these semi-skilled labor machines "create." We are marching ever faster to a place where 80% of the people in the first world will be unemployable simply because it costs less to build and maintain a machine over its life than it costs to hire a worker for a single year. It will get to the point where we can retask, recycle, or recreate a machine to do many jobs in less time than it takes to re-train the average human to do the same job at even half the efficiency.

The productivity gains from the industrial and information revolutions have not resulted in shorter work weeks for all, but rather a larger unemployed population. It's hard to imagine this will end well.

The productivity gains from the industrial and information revolutions have not resulted in shorter work weeks for all, but rather a larger unemployed population. It's hard to imagine this will end well.

We would have had a chance if it hadn't been for the systematic dismantling of organized labor starting in the late 70s/early 80s. The canary in the coal mine there, I think, was Reagan firing the air traffic controllers.

GDP per capita in America is amazing and has only been climbing for the last 40 years. However, real median income peaked in 1973 and for the past ten years we've had stagnant or declining wages in non-inflation adjusted dollars. Of course, CEO pay is up like 40x, and corporate profits are at an all time high. The American worker has gotten more and more productive and seen none of the gains. It's all gone to capital. If we actually had a labor movement, there would have been general strikes by now. Higher pay and 30 hour work weeks. The gains in productivity would actually be shared with the worker.

Instead we're just going to get picked off one by one until we wind up with 1% of people fantastically wealthy, 9% keeping the machines running, 80% of people unemployed and starving, and the remaining 10% in riot gear keeping the bottom 80% from revolting.

The the 9% machinery operators and the 10% riot suppressors have children who might not make it to the 9% or the 10%. They are the ones who will provide aid, logistics, intelligence to the mass of 80%. But if the social machinery operating and the riot suppressing become hereditary, then the situation becomes stable. Children of 1% stay in 1%. Children of the 9% and 10% stay in their "station", since they realize how lucky they are for not being in the

Farming was once 90%+of the population. It's been less than 3% (in the US) for a LONG time. Technology has been increasing productivity for thousands of years. The dystopias don't come from technology.

Sorry, robots didn't take a giant leap in 2008. There must be some other "mysterious" reason for the ongoing malaise...

When farming fell from 90% to 3% of work force in USA, it was an exporting nation. America was just sucking in jobs from India and China. Those countries were so politically naive they did not even know they were being decimated in the economic warfare then. Now as the manufacturing has fallen below 20%, where are we sucking in jobs from?

Neal Stephenson had it right when he said Music, Movies, and Microcode. But the rest of the world will figure this stuff out eventually. It is adorable and charming watching them gradually zero in on our style.

"Foxconn said its new "Foxbots" will cost roughly $20,000 to $25,000 to make, but individually be able to build an average of 30,000 devices."

So approximately $1.2-$1.5 of the cost of an iPhone will be eaten up by a robot that can only make 30,000 devices before having to be replaced? For some reason, I think Foxconn is probably even better at the financial math than that, and the quote seems so wrong in both a factual error and a grammatical error sense I actually had to RTFA (I hate you, redletterdave) and sure enough the quote is direct from the Businessweek article (I hate you even more, Dave Smith of Businessweek). However, reading 5 other variations of the same announcement, not one of them uses the same phraseology, which makes me wonder where the quote actually came from. Dailytech [dailytech.com], for example, says that Foxconn will have 30,000 Foxbots installed by the end of the year and makes no mention of the speed at which they can build anything (which makes sense, since the robots are so simple- basically pick and place- that no one robot could build an entire device). Another website, Regator [regator.com], gives the same clue, saying they already have 10K Foxbots, and plan to install another 20K by the end of the year.

So with the manual labour jobs being given to robots, and a distinct lack of young women, (thanks to female babies being unwanted) things are certainly looking bright for the tens of millions of young Chinese males.

I'm sure they'll take it philosophically - enormous gangs of angry, sexually frustrated young men usually do.

That is not taking into consideration the cost of materials. Which will be incredibly high as these machines are not building iphones out of iron and oil they are putting CPUs into slots, and screwing together cases.
They are probably replacing a $2 a device worker with a $1 a device machine.

What, $200 in components per iPhone? Thas's not "incredibly high". There's still a lot of money to be gained if they can shave of a few dollars from each assembly. Personally, I find the lifetime of 30000 assembly cycles per robot very low (perhaps they meant through some time period?), but even it that were the case, 30000 times a few dollars is still several times the cost of the robot.

They already are incredibly cheap to manufacture. How do you think Apple gets all that profit every single year?

Of course if the robots were that good the location where the manufacturing plant is should be mostly inconsequential. Productions could be anywhere with cheap space and electricity. What I suspect will happen, as usually does in any corporation that tries to apply robots to what used to be an all human assembly line, is massive failure and hiring of more indentured servants, er i mean interns.

China has a massive manufacturing hub in the hong kong - shenhzen - guangzhou region because a huge collection of components are available there, with a large collection of factories and workers who can flexibly shift between factories to meet rapidly variable demand (particularly for somewhere like foxconn who work for many related businesses - oh, dell you can wait 48 hours while we throw together 100k phone screens for apple who need them right now, and in 48 hours we'll have enough staff brought on board to do both).

If you're important enough and need enough made they'll shut down schools for you to get more workers. And the areas are small (relatively) stand in the centre draw a 100Km circle around yourself and you've got 120+ million in a giant megacity making stuff for the world. It's amazing and terrifying and a lot of other things all at once. Imagine what the industrial revolution London did to the world - only 100x bigger. And that's thing - while some of the advanced semiconductor components are made elsewhere still so much of the supply chain, glass, displays, the motherboards, the plastic etc. etc. etc. all in a tiny little radius all shipped out around the world in 3 days.

Hmm... you wouldn't buy some cheap knockoff, would you? If your phone costs less than $800, it's not "premium" or "VIP" or how do they call these things nowadays. So no, prices would remain the same because people are already buying phones at current prices, and even if it will go up they'll gladly pay for the magical "status item". Lawyers and marketologists could ask for a raised salary, though.